Top Five Lists Are Hard

I failed miserably at attempting to do a daily creative thing. Yesterday was an extremely crappy day on the work front, or at least one that drained every little bit of sanity out of me. By the time I got home I just wanted to vegetate on the sofa and play some games. With the announcement of the Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire expansion coming in September, this I am sure rekindled the fires for a lot of folks. For me personally… its particular un-directed style of roaming aimlessly yet still feeling like you accomplished something was a reasonable fit for the state of mind I happened to be in last night. It’s funny how my opinions of this game have changed significantly over the years. While I was in Alpha I was not a fan at all… and this is still the only Alpha program I purposefully resigned from. In Beta however I started to see some of the merits and played a little bit at launch, however that did not last extremely long. For years afterwards I was a bit at odds with the game and not really getting what everyone else was seeing in it. However about a year ago the AggroChat crew all returned and started doing some of the group content and more or less I began to see the merit. More recently I just find it an excellent source of bite sized entertainment… which is I think the intended goal all along. Of the original Guild Wars content, Nightfall was probably my favorite “expansion” that of course wasn’t actually an expansion. So since Path of Fire is going to be in that same area I am looking forward to this expansion way more than I did Heart of Thorns. I also find it extremely interesting that they are continuing to give horizontal progression… which on some level has traditionally bothered me… but also allows me to not feel left behind each time the game moves forward. The primary problem there is that I feel so far behind in the alternate progression paths that I will likely never actually catch up without a serious time investment.

Yesterday a tweet was making its way across my twitterverse and it was interesting seeing everyone’s responses. The problem however is that I personally have a really hard time narrowing it down to a list of 50… let alone a list of 5. I made an effort to do so… then as soon as I posted it came up with half a dozen other alternates that potentially could have bounced the titles I listed from contention. When I look at an “of all time” list I tend to think of things in terms of long term replay-ability as well as the overall experience I had playing the game. Namely can I pick this title up today and still play it with the same level of joy that I had when I originally played the game. This means there is a significant number of titles from the PS1 and PS2 eras that are just dead to me without the introduction of a remaster or remake. We’ve experienced this several times in the AggroChat game club as we attempted to relive a title from the past only to find it doesn’t live up to our modern expectations for how a game should behave. So here is the list of games that I managed to whittle down to on impulse yesterday.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

This is the only game that is pretty much universally always going to be my number one slot… until something dethrones it. I love everything about this game from the art style to the music to the level design. I have this title in the original PS1 release, Sega Saturn, PSP, PS3, PS Vita, and Xbox 360 versions. To the best of my knowledge this means I own it on pretty much every platform it has been released on… and truthfully I can happily keep playing this over and over. About once a year I seem to boot it up and play through it… and I am secretly hoping that the Switch gets a release at some point.

Fallout New Vegas

I waffled on this one a bit because I like ALL of the modern Fallout games… but personally I feel like New Vegas is the best version so far. It has everything I liked about Fallout 3 but includes a much better overarching storyline. At release this was rife with all manner of bugs… but over time through official and unofficial patches it has reached an extremely solid state and is one of those games I can still boot up at any time and return to happily.

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

This for me is always likely going to be the pinnacle of the Legend of Zelda franchise. Its Zelda at its most Zeldaish, and again this is one of those games that I can keep playing over and over. I remember this also being one of the first times I was completely shocked by a World 2 transition, in thinking I had almost beat the game… and then finding out that maybe I had finished a fifth of it. What I love the most is just how much stuff lies just slightly off the path and is not really required to beat the game.

Dragon Age: Origins

There are times I would like to say that I love the Dragon Age franchise… but in truth I really just love Dragon Age: Origins. I have significant problems with Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, and I just can’t ever seem to get anywhere near as engaged as I did the first time. The thing is… it isn’t actually the first time because I have continued to successfully return to this world and play it over and over. The Grey Warden storyline beats every storyline they have come up with to date in every possible way… and I just want to keep reliving that character and experience. Additionally this was my Gateway drug into Mass Effect because if I did not love this game… I probably never would have given that franchise a second shot.

Mass Effect 2

Linked to the one above… Mass Effect 2 is the pinnacle of the series for me personally. It does the most things I want from Mass Effect which is honestly the “away mission” feel that you have in this game. In part I think Andromeda does a good job of recapturing this feeling, but the second game in the series will always hold a special place in my heart because it is the game that made me fall in love with this setting. I bounced pretty hard off of the PC port of Mass Effect because of the fairly cludgy interface, but after absolutely loving Dragon Age… and finding out that ME2 was going to be using that engine I gave the game a second shot. What I found was this rich world that ultimately caused me to go back and suffer through the first game so I could experience more of it. I love everything about this game from the recruitment of interesting characters, to ominous baddies… and even more ominous allies.

More Games

The moment I hit send I had a flood of other titles that really should have been included, and as a result I am just going to run through a few of these without delving into them. Regardless this is an extremely difficult exercise, because how do you condense over thirty five years of gaming into a single list of five.

Destiny

Diablo 3

Final Fantasy VI

Super Mario World

Knights of the Old Republic

Planescape Torment

Super Metroid

Phantasy Star IV

Guardian Heroes

Rivercity Ransom

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo

Mortal Kombat II

World of Warcraft

Hellgate London

Wolfenstein New Order

Doom II

Minecraft

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2

Thomas Was Alone

and honestly… the moment I hit post I will think of several dozen more than deserve to be on the list. Basically this is a really hard thing to do for me.